The World Without Us

Often, Santian ties leather shoes on his long legs and climbs Kileleoni Hill, the highest point in the Mara. It is still wild enough to find impala carcasses hanging from tree limbs where leopards have stored them. From the top, Santian can look 60 miles south into Tanzania and the immense green-grass sea of the Serengeti. There, honking wildebeest mill in huge June flocks that will soon merge like floodwaters and burst across the border, bounding through rivers that boil with crocodiles awaiting their annual northward migration, with lions and leopards dozing above in the tortilis trees, needing only to roll over to make a kill.

The Serengeti has long been an object of Maasai bitterness: half a million square kilometers from which they were swept away in 1951, for a theme park cleansed of a keystone species, Homo sapiens, to humor Hollywood-bred tourist delusions of Africa as wilderness primeval. But Maasai naturalists like Santian are now grateful for it: the Serengeti, blessed with perfect volcanic soils for grassland, is gene bank to the richest concentration of mammals on Earth, a source from which species might one day radiate and repopulate the rest of the planet, if it comes to that. Huge as it is, however, naturalists worry about how the Serengeti will maintain all those uncountable gazelles, let alone elephants, if everything surrounding it turns into farms and fences.

There isn’t enough rain to change all the savanna into arable farmland. But that hasn’t stopped the Maasai from multiplying. So far married to only one woman, Partois ole Santian decided to stop right there. But Noonkokwa, the childhood girlfriend he wed upon completing his traditional warrior training, was horrified to learn that she might be in this marriage alone, with no female companions.

“I’m a naturalist,” he explained to her. “If all the wildlife habitat disappeared, I’d have to farm.” Before subdividing began, Maasai considered farming beneath the dignity of men chosen by God to pastor cattle. They wouldn’t even break sod to bury someone.

Noonkokwa understood. But she was still a Maasai woman. They compromised at two wives. But she still wanted six children. He was hoping to hold it to four; the second wife, of course, would want some, too.

Only one thing, too terrible to contemplate, might slow all this proliferating before all the animals go extinct. The old man, Koonyi, had said it himself. “The end of the Earth,” he called it. “In time, AIDS will wipe out humans. The animals will take it all back.”

AIDS isn’t yet the nightmare for the Maasai that it has become for sedentary tribes, but Santian saw how it could be soon. Once, Maasai only traveled on foot through savannas with their cows, spear in hand. Now some go to towns, sleep with whores, and spread AIDS on their return. Even worse are the lorry drivers who now show up twice a week, bringing gasoline for the pickups, motor scooters, and tractors that Maasai farmers purchase. Even young uncircumcised girls are getting infected.

In non-Maasai areas, such as up at Lake Victoria, where the Serengeti animals migrate each year, coffee growers too sick with AIDS to groom their plants have turned to growing easy staples like bananas, or cutting trees to make charcoal. Coffee bushes, now feral, are 15 feet high, beyond rehabilitation. Santian has heard people say they don’t care anymore, there’s no cure, so they won’t stop having children. So orphans now live with a virus instead of with parents, in villages where the adults have been all but wiped out.

Houses with no one left alive are collapsing. Mud-stick huts with dung roofs have melted away, leaving only half-finished houses of brick and cement begun by traders with money made from driving their lorries. Then they got sick, and gave their money to herbalists to cure them and their girlfriends. Nobody got well, and construction never resumed. The herbalists got all the money, then got sick themselves. In the end, the traders died, the girlfriends died, the medicine men died, and the money vanished; all that remains are roofless houses with acacias growing in the middle, and infected children who sell themselves to survive until they die early.

“It’s wiping out a generation of future leaders,” Santian had replied to Koonyi that afternoon, but the old Maasai figured that future leaders wouldn’t matter much with animals back in charge.

The sun rolls along the Serengeti Plain, filling the sky with iridescence. As it falls over the edge, blue twilight settles on the savanna. The day’s remaining warmth floats up the side of Kileleoni Hill and dissolves into the dusk. The chilly updraft that follows carries the screech of baboons. Santian pulls his red-and-yellow tartan shuka tighter.